Students Affiliated with the Centre

PhD Topic: The Idioms of Health and Well-Being for the Paniyas of Wayanad, Southern India
Through an ethnographic account of life for the Paniyas of Wayanad, an ex-slave tribal community of southern India, I am looking at how biomedical health programs and economic development initiatives are often used as a means through which religious organisations and political parties can endear themselves to communities and gain local legitimacy. Healthcare, then, becomes a conduit through which ideology is transferred and bio-political subjects are made. With the use of biomedicine on the increase, and the normative pressures of 'modernity' bearing down on local healing rituals and religious practices, locating the local idioms of health and well-being allows us to understand the symbolic nature of health care and to see how individuals negotiate the point of intersection between implementation of institutionalised development and health care, and the drive for self determination.

PhD Topic: All Roads to Rome
My thesis examines the ways in which immigrants and minorities in contemporary Rome construct their identities in place, thus creating new ways of understanding and of being in Rome. I am especially interested in the interplay between concepts of identity and of place that inform our experiences of power and politics in everyday life.

PhD Topic: The experiences and practices of tolerance within everyday negotiations of cultural difference
Tolerance is often treated as a moral precept that exists on a spectrum between the position of advocates, who equate it to respect, and critics, who object to its permissiveness. My research, however, takes a normative view of tolerance as a practice through which mutual recognition can be achieved across cultural differences. By recovering tolerance as an empirical concept, I hope to explain its everyday practice and meaning in both failed and successful inter-cultural interactions, which I argue can be understood as differentiated relationships of recognition. In this way, recognition provides a critical lens through which to understand the horizon along which everyday strategies and meanings of tolerance connect to the way in which we imagine a decent and multicultural society.

PhD Topic: The effects of activist campaigns against use of prenatal diagnostic technology in sex selection in India.
Visual culture and embodiment in urban South India. How global images of bodies create new kinds of gendered communities and how new possibilities of inclusion challenge older gender hierarchies. The ways in which more entrenched forms of exclusion (such as gender, class and caste) mitigate the flows of cosmopolitan identities, determining who has access to new opportunities in this fluid cultural landscape.

PhD Topic: This PhD examines the phenomenology of volunteering across ages, ethnicities and geography, exploring its meaning in people's lives and its contribution to the social fabric of communities. This PhD will also involve the making of a documentary about volunteering.

PhD Topic: The Links Between Cultural Identity and Priorities for Early Childhood Education and Care: A Study of Malaysian-Chinese Parents' Perception of Own Cultural Identity
How parents view cultural identity impacts the overall development of their children, regardless of where they are but more so if they are immigrants or do not belong to the dominant group. The topic of cultural identity in early childhood education has only started to gain more attention in the recent years due to the rising trend of immigration. There is, however, a proliferation of literature on cultural or ethnic identity for school-going children, from primary to high school age range. While not downplaying the children's own views on their cultural identity, it is contended that parents' perception of the importance of cultural identity plays an equally, if not more important role in the maintenance of culture and shaping of a cultural, or even, self-identity. Research that provides insight into view of parents, especially from immigrant families would contribute to the growing body of early childhood education literature that is becoming increasingly cross-cultural. This study, therefore aims to explore Malaysian-Chinese parents' perception of their own cultural identity and the links between that perception and the priorities they place in the education and care of their children.